Starship Krupa

Wow, thank you so much, @JnTuneTech. This gives me a lot to chew on. It also makes me ponder whether this functionality could be amended/expanded for the benefit of the VSTi's that are probably in the majority these days. Not sure yet what to ask for, though.

A true Brit, he.

I've been spending more time with the documentation. Unfortunately, none of it is helping. I feel even more puzzled. What I'm trying to do is make custom names show up in place of the piano keys, to be used with MDrummer. I would like to start with the stock GM Drums because most of the assignments are the same, I'd just need to change some of them. Should this be done with a text editor? Should it be done in the Define Instruments and Names dialog? If "text editor" is the answer, what file do I edit? Another question. While poring over the documentation, it finally came to me that all this instrument definitions stuff seemed to be really oriented toward using external hardware synths, not VSTi's. How much of it is applicable to VSTi's? Bonus question: I tried making a MIDI track with no synth associated, with its output set to be the input of my MIDI interface, and I set it to Ch. 10, which I had set in "Add Instrument Definitions" to General MIDI Drums. Some interesting things happened, like the notes in PRV turned diamond-shaped instead of rectangular. I kinda liked it. Is there some way to make that happen for a soft synth?

Max, Lewis, Fernando. World champions all, great to seem them all on the podium last race. Nice tribute.

There are some excellent sounds here.

So I'm not the only one around here who fantasizes about attending the Monaco Grand Prix. Nice. I checked out maybe going to the Vegas GP this year, but it sold out of its (expensive!) tickets pretty quickly. I'm working on a song called "Grand Prix Weekend" that has a little tribute to Malcolm McLaren's "Buffalo Girls." I have a sample of David Croft saying "Lando Norris goes 'round the outside!" (round the outside, round the outside).

Very nice.

Yikes. I hope there was a nice pop screen between the talent and that poor C12!

I've become resigned to the fact that I'll have to clean up after some installers, ones that install AAX and so forth. To me, at least, the T-Racks products I have licenses for are worth the trouble of moving the ones I don't have licenses for. Especially their Fairchild 670 emulation.

If what you're concerned with is not having Cakewalk scanning unnecessary demo plug-ins from a bundle and then displaying them in the Browser, you can delete (or move to an unscanned folder) the DLL's (including the .VST3 DLL's). I do this with IK Multimedia T-Racks, which installs every T-Racks plug-in regardless of which ones you have licenses for. I have a folder named TRacks and just drag the .VST3 files I don't want to the folder after installation. If all you care about is just not having them show up in Browser, then what abacab said about using Plug-In Manager to exclude them from view is the ticket.

Well, yes, de gustibus. Look at my favorite plug-in house, MeldaProduction, and you'll see quite a difference in approach to Waves'. That "get under the hood" thing where I can see exactly what the plug-in is doing is attractive to me. And heaven knows there are plenty of people who wouldn't touch a Melda plug-in with a ten foot pole due to the clinical UI's. It's not as if I've tried the entire Waves line, just the freebies I've snagged, which do include Hybrid Comp, RVox and RBass. Also a Chris Alge reverb thingie. An assortment of One Knob FX I'll never use. I'm newer to this than most of the people who post here, I think. I started working with a DAW again about 9 years ago. I was using Mixcraft, which comes with a load of plug-ins, and I got the MFreeFX bundle, IKM T-Racks freebies, UltraChannel, Ozone Elements and the CM suite pretty early, before I got most of the Waves stuff. So I'd already been exposed to some good processors and developed a workflow with them by the time I experienced most of the Waves things, most of which are much older than the other ones I'd been working with. They just don't do anything that other plug-ins I have don't do as well or better. Add to that the janky (and single seat; I always run at least 2 active systems, sometimes 3) licensing, and they've never made it into my rotation. MetaFilter is pretty cool, and I found a very useful novelty patch in Elements 2. But Elements is a resource hog. And if a synth is a resource hog, it better sound as good as Chromaphone. ? So I have a more limited experience with them. It might be that the ones that would blow my mind are ones that I've never tried. At this point, I many more mixing FX than I could possibly learn how to make full use of. I'm only in the market for sound design-y FX and I don't think that's really Waves' strong suit (aside from the aforementioned MetaFilter).

I'd guess that somehow it's not terminating correctly. I doubt this is the case, because I replace FX and synths like crazy and would soon overpower my system.

No, I'm not supplying any, I'm going to be once again attempting to understand the process in order to create one. Specifically one for my newly-acquired MDrummer. MDrummer is one of those drum machines where MIDI notes trigger pads and also patterns, and I want to map it out so I can program beats in the good ol' PRV. I am amused by the official documentation's encouraging yet authoritarian tone and would like to share in my amusement. Quoth the Reference Guide: "Creating instrument definitions Cakewalk lets you create and edit instrument definitions. To create an instrument definition, you must answer these types of questions:" Emphasis mine. Sounds pretty serious, the docs obviously want you to have your doo-doo together before you even TRY to create an instrument definition. I will attempt to answer them one by one. 1. What are the names of the patches in each bank? "Patches?" I just want to make the kick drum be labeled "kick drum" when I'm using the PRV. 2. Which note names should be used for each patch? Note names for each patch?? I just want to give names to the notes. I don't want to give different note names for each patch. The instrument uses a bunch of different patches, but they all have C1 as the kick drum. A synth can have a piano patch or a string patch but they both use the same note names, right? Same thing but I want it to be "Kick" instead of "C1" 3. What are the names of the MIDI Controllers for this instrument? Um, names of MIDI controllers? Still nothing about assigning a name to a MIDI note, which is kind of what I thought this was about. I'm using my trusty ol' Yamaha CS6X as my main MIDI controller, but I sense that that is not what is being asked. It has knobs, keys, and a mod and pitch wheel though. I've had it for over 20 years and never named it. Some of my guitars have names, but they're not MIDI....okay, I'll shut up now. 4. Which RPN and NRPNs are available on the instrument? Which what?? I could not be more confused right now. 5. Which Bank Select method does the instrument use? Oh SNAP. Make a liar out of me instantly, eh? I'm not even going to try with this one. "Same one we all use: the one with the most heartwarming TV commercials." 6. To collect this information, you need the MIDI documentation for your instrument. MIDI documentation? As in the manual? It's all supposed to be somewhere in the instrument's manual? Are you familiar with MeldaProduction's documentation? He's like this superintelligent Star Trek giant brain person. "I find your human language too....limited...to convey the...complexity of my...ideas." Just hang on while I crawl off and die. Now, having failed to gather a single answer to these "must answer" questions, let's see how many of the actual steps I can fail to follow. Here’s a general outline of the steps you must follow to create an instrument definition: 1. Create a new instrument in the Instrument tree. Okay, there's a diagram with "Instruments tree" indicated. Plural. I'll assume typo. So....right click, I guess? "New Instrument." Super! There we go. "MDrummer." <enter> Hey! It's even got all that NPR stuff filled in already. Starting to feel like this might work. 2. Create any new name lists in the Names tree that are required for the instrument. I do want to give names to notes. I guess that's done in a "name list." Okay, right click on Note Names....okay, Add Note Names List, ooh, call it MDrummer, yeah. Now how do I actually assign the note names? Right click MDrummer....Add note name! Okay, 0=0. I can see that it understands a bit of algebra. So I guess that one by one I'm going to populate this list with name assignments in the form of <MIDI#>=<note name>. It's kinda like if Drum Maps got in a transporter accident with RegEdit. That's a lot of right clicking and typing! But at least I have the steps down. 3. Drag name lists and possibly a bank select method to the new instrument from the Names tree. Okay, maybe this is a way to not have to right click and type quite as much? What do I drag from where to where? I see a whole lotta Patch-y/Bank-y stuff on the left side but nothing that looks like just note names, and the right hand box doesn't seem to like me trying to drag and drop vertically.... 4. Close the Define Instruments and Names dialog box. Done.

Actually, I think he was set up. Oh, wait, not that Krupa. Never mind. Talkin' 'bout my Gene-ration. What part of my long-winded sociopsychobabble blather is hard to believe this time? ?

Question for Jacques: have you tried your engine and CPU load tests comparing the usage with the plug-ins' GUI's closed and open? It surprises me how many plug-ins show a big difference when they are or are not displaying their UI, especially in Task Manager.

Good heavens, Neoverb is the most resource-hungry reverb plug-in I've seen. And SSL have found a way to have theirs eat up even more resources? I think that when plug-ins are especially resource-hungry, that's bad for business in more than one way. If the assumption is "the current computers can handle it," not everyone has a "current" computer. The more plug-ins I can run, the more I tend to use (=buy).

There's a tribal comfort about so many (virtually arbitrary) choices we make. We want other people to like the things we like and believe the things we believe. And if they don't, we set our brains to figuring out nasty reasons why they don't. They must be stupid, racist, lazy, privileged, have criminal intent, or be contrarians. Somehow, the things we buy and use and watch and listen to become part of our identity and it can feel like a rejection of a part of us if people like other things better. "Wait, my superior ears and shopping abilities led to me believing that X products were the best! Now this guy doesn't want anything to do with them! Is something wrong with my tastes or is something wrong with him?" Waves are kind of weird for me. I know they were once considered the apex of plug-in FX, but I've harvested every freebie they and their affiliates have offered for many years and was excited about it at first because "oboy, WAVES plug-in! I now haz pro studio!" and although TrueVerb wound up on a lot of stuff due to not having a better sounding one, none of the rest of the products have found a place on my go-to list. Even legendary ones like RBass and RVox. And never touched TrueVerb once I got Phoenix Stereo. The Waves Central app confuses me about exactly what I'm doing and what's it's doing when I want to move a license or update or whatever. The one-seat-per-license ain't great, either, although I forgive that for exactly one product line, Exponential Audio reverbs. Obviously, Waves' products are still popular enough to create the storm of complaints when they tried to change the licensing, but sonically I've never understood what the fuss was about. Individual iZotope, IKM, brainworx and Melda products have all blown me away at some point or other, but I've never had that experience with a Waves product.

Whoa. I'm very interested in generational cohorts, the 10-year cycle of (oddly-named, given that it includes the Beatles, Stones, and Dylan) Silent Generation (1935-45), Woodstock Boomers (aka "Me Generation" 1945-55), Generation Jones (mine, 1955-1965), and Generation X (1965-75). This fits.

Okay, Dave, I have to ask: antisemitism? Oh, wait, Waves are an Israel-based company, right. So if someone eschews MeldaProduction because of the complex, clinical UI and scant documentation, they're anti-Czech bigots? ? Surely it wasn't this forum, but the old one, which had a different vibe (especially outside the Coffee House)? Those cats made my enthusiasm for MeldaProduction look like Unitarianism vs. their Unification Church devotion to Waves. Anyone who had a mixing question: first thing to do is get the appropriate Waves plug-in. I even put a line in my sig to the effect of "enough with the Waves recommendations." My first recommendation if someone seems to be in need of expanding their collection mixing FX (or just wants to) is almost always freeware. If ya can't get it done with Kilohearts Essentials, MFreeFX, and the Dead Duck FX, maybe more learning rather than more software? Oh, also Trackspacer. Everyone must have Trackspacer.?

Okay, I'll hop in here. When I was 11 years old, the album that "Frankenstein" is from, They Only Come Out At Night, was the most terrifying album cover I'd ever seen in my life: Gotta hand it to Ed and Rick and the boys, the "Frankenstein" riff....wow. I'm pretty sure I saw a Midnight Special appearance that was the source the video. I showed it to a friend of mine, 20 years younger, and he said "Reznor must have seen this when he was a kid." Trent would have been about 7 to my 11 when this came out and I have no doubt it made an impression on his eventual Nine Inch Nails stage persona. Youngsters of my generation were exposed to some brilliant rock showmanship thanks to Burt Sugarman and Don Kirshner. Ones that stood out: Winter, Neil Young (with Crazy Horse, he had a roadie bring out a fan to blow his hair around on "Like a Hurricane"), Gary Wright (also strapped on the keyboard), Robert Fripp (with Frippertronics, that appearance rewrote my DNA), The Bee Gees (doing this weird departure for them called "Jive Talkin") Brownsville Station (Cub Koda had great schtick), Bowie's 1980 Floor Show, Alice Cooper's Welcome to My Nightmare....

So many ways. I might select the area then hit Delete to create room, then drag/nudge the left one over, I might also just split it in one place, drag the edge of one of the resulting clips to make room and drag it over.

Yes, that's the place to get Fracture and Hysteresis. I can't see anywhere on their site to get the updates for the paid products. AFAIK, they don't have trial versions, never seen a license key. I don't know if they even have a licensing mechanism other than the fact that you have to be kinda out-there to want them in the first place. Matter of fact, when they're working correctly, they make the kind of sounds that other companies use in their unregistered trials to make the stuff "unusable."

And really, as producers of music know, there's the hidden-in-plain-sight flaw: these are all idea generators. As with any pursuit, technological, economic, gastronomic, whatever, coming up with ideas ain't the hard part. Building a finished product out of those ideas is where it breaks down. Example: what these generators do for you is basically noodling in a key. Anyone here need help with that? Tell you what: try playing just the white keys, with your right hand fingers split to allow one key in between each finger. Either 3 fingers or 4. Move that around. Now add to that your left hand, playing a split octave. Move them both around independently. Does one of the patterns sound cool? Congratulations, you just did a John Henry on the AI (minus the falling ill and dying part). Need something on top of it? Duplicate your MIDI track and turn on Cakewalk's built-in arpeggiator and run through some different presets. Take just the left hand notes and apply the arpeggiator and instant bass line. John Henry was a steel-drivin' man. Want to hear how it sounds in a different key, or modulate it to a different key? Select the notes in Piano Roll and right click. Choose Transpose. Hey: I'm no programmer, but I could probably learn enough to code that in a couple of days. Maybe Flowstone or Synthedit? Iz I geniuz AI guy yet? See what I did there? I created an algorithm, came up with the idea to turn it into a script. Took me longer to type it than think it up. And what will come of it is....nothing. Ideas are cheap. Turning them into finished products is the hard part. I'm never going to sit down and learn Flowstone. Although I might try programming it in MPowerSynth's or MSoundFactory's arpeggiator.... Things that really help are tools that enable us to get from ideas to finished products with greater ease. 3-D printers. DAW's, NLE's, word processing programs, spreadsheet programs. The proliferation of all-in-one mastering plug-ins, bx_masterdesk (true or untrue peak), T-Racks ONE, Ozone, etc.

I only ever install VST3's if the plug-in is available in that format (and works correctly in that format vs. the VST2 version). It was 27 new products, some of them with variations as far as number of outputs, so about 30 new plug-ins. I don't install every MeldaProduction product; some of the newer ones sound better than their older versions, or have features that eclipse ones I bought previously. No MReverb or MReverbMB, no MFreeformAnalogEQ, no MDynamicEQ. The first two sound nowhere near as good as MTurboReverb and the second two are products with reduced feature sets compared to others in the line. Yes, for a hobbyist, there is no such thing as wasted time at the DAW. But if one does have certain goals, like "I would like to have something to put on Bandcamp," or "I want to make something that other people can listen to," then play can turn into procrastination. I think it's good to be in the "play" state, but there is a "get it finished" state, too. They're both fun. Just the other night, a friend of mine was asking about a sound he heard on a song that could have been the person's voice, or her cello, either one obviously processed. So I tried to see how fast I could duplicate it with free plug-ins, and it turned out that a sine-y patch in TAL-Noisemaker (my favorite "simple" synth), MVibrato, and KHs Delay (with formants because I knew it was her voice) nailed it. 15 minutes after his query, I sent him a sample of me noodling in the same key as the song and explained how I did it. Fun!

Interesting question. I would compare it to other technological advancements. I still write down ideas and hum melodies into my phone. But the slower way that you mention....yeah, it's like the ways Americans travel now. If a destination is more than about 1/4 mile away, we hop in the car. Back when we would have walked that distance (think of childhood), there would have been so many things to see and experience. Figure in longer car trips, coast-to-coast airplane flights, and all that experience we no longer have. There's an entire genre of literature and film devoted to the pioneers who traveled from St. Louis, MO to....wherever. Today, if I decide I want to visit St. Louis, from where I am on the West coast, if I got the idea in my head in the daytime, I could probably buy a ticket and be there that evening, checked into a motel. The trip would consist of sitting in a padded chair for a few hours, hoping that they had good enough wi fi that I could do exactly what I would be doing at home, then I'd get to said motel and do it some more before going to bed. Writing letters, heck, writing email between friends is a lost art. The mundane truth that I discovered a few years ago when I was really working on doing good vocals was that the "secret" to improving my singing voice was the same one as for any other instrument: 5% study, 95% practice. Believe it or not, I used to think that people had whatever voice they were born with and that was about it. Learn how to sing in tune and use what the lord gave you. Nuh-uh. Practice singing 30 minutes a day for a week: amazing improvement. What happened was that I was playing around with the DAW and different mics, recording the same vocal over and over again. By the time I got to about the 15th repetition, over a couple of sessions, I was sounding as tight and smooth as a friggin' barbershop quartet.